[Talk-us] Potential Import of Addresses for Thurston County, WA, USA

[Mark Wagner]

On Sun, 09 Aug 2020 03:53:55 -0700
Raven King <thekingofravens at disroot.org> wrote:

> Hello:
> 
> I discovered that Thurston County, WA publishes a database of
> addresses stored as gps pins inside a shape file. 
> The data can be found here:
> https://gisdata-thurston.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/thurston-address-points-tcomm?geometry=-122.915%2C47.023%2C-122.914%2C47.023
> 
> The license can be seen where it has a link labeled "Custom License"
> next to a picture of a lock. I didn't see anything in there that would
> prohibit our use of this, but extra eyes are needed. 

The most interesting clauses in the license is:

"Users are not authorized to license, re-license, assign, release
publish, transfer, sell or otherwise make available any portion of
these Data, or any information from GIS data derived from these
Datasets, to a third party in any format revealing Thurston County as
the source of the data."

This solves the attribution issue quite nicely: we're *forbidden* to
credit this data to Thurston County. 

> The database has 128,639 addresses. My goal would be to import the
> entirety of it into OSM, as Thurston county has very few addresses in
> OSM. They would be imported as points, since the database has them
> stored as points.
> 
> The caveats I see are as follows:
> * The database probably has some addresses that are wrong. While
> everything I could verify has been correct, I only checked about 100
> addresses. 

A quick look at the data in JOSM doesn't reveal any large-scale
problems.  Some observations: 

* Almost every point corresponds to a building or some other object
  (eg. a parking lot) that would reasonably be expected to have an
  address.  There are a few oddities, such as a wetland.

* There are a few multi-story apartment buildings where the address
  points don't correspond to the actual locations of the units.

* I think you'll want to build street names off the "StreetName",
  "St_PreMod", "St_PreDir", "St_PreType", "St_PosDir", and "St_PosType"
  fields rather than any of the other fields.

* There are seven duplicate addresses in the data.

-- 
Mark